It’s been almost a decade since music video director turned feature filmmaker Jonathan Glazer delivered his third and most recent effort from behind the camera, and yet Under the Skin continues to live up to its moniker by burrowing into the hearts, minds, and psyches of sci-fi and horror fans everywhere.
In fact, the idiosyncratic, offbeat, existential, and altogether creepy as hell trip into inter-dimensional terror and bloody murder has embarked on a major streaming renaissance. As per FlixPatrol, the haunting and harrowing story following Scarlett Johansson’s unnamed extraterrestrial traveling around Scotland in a van to lure unsuspecting victims to their doom can currently be found as the 10th most-watched title on the HBO Max charts in the United States.
Under the Skin has proven to be unsurprisingly polarizing among critics and fans, with a Certified Fresh Rotten Tomatoes score of 84 percent hardly being reflected in the decidedly more tepid 55 percent user rating. It’s not an easy film to get on board with if you’re not on the exact same wavelength, and the thematic undercurrent can often be mysterious to the point of impenetrable, but the people who love it really love it.
Johansson’s The Female uses her feminine wiles in search of human prey, catapulting her victims into a terrifying alternate reality in which they’re literally devoured. However, nascent humanity throws a spanner into her work as a cosmic killing machine, leading to an opinion-splitting journey that hypnotizes, mesmerizes, and confounds in equal measure, with Under the Skin poised to generate an entirely new wave of reactions.